Living in the now

Hey, a blog post that reviews happenings or stuff from the previous year. That sounds like an original idea…riiiight. So, here’s my life from 2007 – the short form:

January: I started my new job as an employee of Sherwin-Williams on January 2, 2007 (one year ago today), and I’ve been painting the town ever since then. Okay, I’ve been mostly cutting up and painting parts of trucks and buses, but it’s been definitely fun! Watched Napoleon Dynamite for the first time.

February:Valentine’s Day Blizzard, and the florist still delivered flowers for Anna. Lily baptized on the last Sunday of the month.

March: We saw Brian Regan at the beginning of the month and visited North Carolina at the end of the month. My Mom went into the hospital on March 23 because of bad stomach pains.

April: Lily sat up by herself for the first time. Lily’s first Easter. My first Twitter post.

May: My Mom had her second and third surgeries. Rosie and I drove to PA to visit my Mom for Mother’s Day, although she was in ICU the whole time. Season finales for Heroes and Lost. Saw George R.R. Martin in Second Life as Tyrion Lannister.

June: Rosie completed Kindergarten, began swim team, and had her dance recital all within three days. We became members of First Congregational United Church of Christ. Rosie turned 6 and lost her first tooth, while I was burning 36 candles. My first work trip to lovely Ft. Wayne, IN.

July: Lily started crawling. All of us drove to PA for Independence Day. My Mom had her fourth surgery. Rosie swam in the Championship Swim Meet, and we bought Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows later that day.

August: Anna and I celebrated our ninth anniversary by going to the house from “A Christmas Story” and enjoying a wonderful meal at an Indian restaurant. My first blog post on Living in the now. Went sailing with the whole family on Sandusky Bay near Cedar Point on Anna’s brother’s friend’s boat. Rosie and I attended our first Cleveland Indians baseball game. Rosie lost her second tooth and started 1st grade.

September: My Mom celebrated her birthday in the hospital. Lily got her first tooth, took two steps, and started climbing steps. Rosie and I helped assemble kits for National Chemistry Week. Anna and I went for an RIT Alumni cruise on Lake Erie.

October: Lily’s first visit to the emergency room. The 20th annual National Chemisty Week. Halloween parties from the middle of October until the end of the month. Switched to Time Warner Cable and got DVR!

Imagine writing a story with 139 other people where everyone can only use up to 140 characters each. The entries are submitted via Twitter and compiled into an evolving tale. That’s the idea behind Twittories, which was started last Tuesday with Twittory 1: The Darkness Inside. It flows pretty well for having plot twists every few sentences, and I’m still unsure what to make of the story itself as well as the method for creating it. The conception technique makes me think of the “process” used to produce the mystery film footage in William Gibson’s novel, Pattern Recognition (2003).

I’ve signed up for Twittory 2, which has no title yet and still needs about 40 more people to begin.

It started one week ago tomorrow. The confessions of your childhood crushes was spawned as an idea by Gedeon Maheux during an exchange on Twitter last Friday. Here’s a list of the participants, so you can see for whom we swooned:

Who remembers the Ice Princess? It was said to be the world’s largest uncut diamond. What world was that? The wonderful soap opera world of General Hospital in the early 1980s. With it in his possession, the evil megalomaniac, Dr. Evil Mikkos Cassadine, wished to harness the power of the Ice Princess to control the weather…and the world! Mooohahaha!!! Who would save Port Charles and make my heart skip a beat while doing it? Why none other than Laura Spencer (Genie Francis) and…oh yeah, some guys named Luke (Anthony Geary) and Scorpio (Tristan Rogers).

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From Luke & Laura and the Ice Princess to Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. I always wanted to be Luke when playing with my Star Wars action figures as a kid, and my friend (Donnie) would be Han Solo. Prior to Return of the Jedi (1983), both of us would vie for the affections of the young senator from Alderaan. After RotJ, it got a little weird because Luke had a ssssister, a twin sister. However, that no longer mattered as any red-blooded adolescent boy growing up in 1983 had the image of Carrie Fisher dressed in a metal bikini permanently burned into their memory banks. Not even Bail Organa could memory-wipe that from my mind.

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When Gedeon initially proposed this blog idea, one of the first names that popped into my head was Christine “Moose” McGlade from the Canadian imported You Can’t Do That On Television, which ran on Nickelodeon in its early days. I’m not sure why I was attracted to her. Maybe it had something to do with her saying, “I don’t know” and getting slimed in a Flashdance fashion. When did that ever happen? Maybe this falls under the Too Much Information category. Ged, I thought you said this was supposed to a guilt-free chance to share our crushes with the world!

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During the summer of 1984, I became infatuated with a certain 4′ 9″ gymnast by the name of Mary Lou Retton. America (and I) had their eyes glued to this energetic, leotard-clad student of Bela Karolyi. She scored a perfect 10 (because she was) in her final vault to give her the gold medal in the individual all-around women’s gymnastic competition. Even though she was 16 and I was 13 at the time, John Williams would have played the “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” at our wedding. Da-Da-Dant! Da-Da-Dant! Dant-Da-Dant-Da-Da! Hey, Anakin was just 9 when he fell in love with the 14-year old Padme.

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The day after the Games of the XXIII Olympiad ended on August 12, 1984, a short-lived ABC TV show Call to Glory premiered and helped start the career of Elisabeth Shue. She played Jackie Sarnac, the teenage daughter of the fictitious USAF pilot Colonel Raynor Sarnac (Craig T. Nelson) at Edward Air Force Base in the early 1960s. Earlier that year, she captured my heart as well as the heart of Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid. She would later marry Tom Cruise in Cocktail (1988) and become Mrs. Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part II (1989). How could I compete with them?

Gedeon Maheux over at gedblog came up with a new cross blog post idea last Friday night. After a brief Twitter conversation, Dave Caolo and I decided to jump on the Childhood Crush Confession 101 bandwagon as well. The object is to simply write about at least five of the McDreamy heartthrobs you had while you and your hormones were growing and changing. Ged has the guidelines posted, and you can contact him if you want to join the pubescent fun! As of this morning, there are five of us willing to share their unrequited loves with the blogosphere this Thursday (December 6). Will you be next?

Bloggin’, bloggin’, bloggin’
Though my fingers are swollen
Keep them bloggies bloggin’
NaBloPoMo-hide!
Memes and pics and blather
Comments I’ll gather
Wishin’ my gal (or guy) was by my side.
All the things I’m missin’,
Good movies, books, and kissin’,
Are waiting at the end of my ride

Keep postin’, postin’, postin’
Our sites are a hostin’,
Keep them bloggies postin’
NaBloPoMo-hide!
Don’t try to understand ’em
Just write and type and post ’em,
Soon our hits’ll be high and wide.
The blog stats calculatin’
December will be waitin’,
Be waitin’ at the end of my ride.

By starting to blog this year and participating in NaBloPoMo, I’ve met a lot of interesting people and have learned some new terms to add to my lexicon. Thanks to the witty Sandy at Momisodes, I’m doing my first meme. Enjoy!

8 things I’m passionate about:

My daughters (Rosie & Lily) / Being a good father

My wife (Anna) / Being a good husband

Science especially chemistry – so much so that I got my B.S. and M.S. in it.

Pittsburgh Steelers – I was born and raised (for three months) in the Steel City of the Three Rivers.

Creating peace – I imperfectly try to hammer swords into plowshares as in Micah 4:3 and transform arrows into flowers like Siddhartha did while under the Bodhi tree.

Last night, a good friend (Talos) posted on Twitter that there was a stray cat in his garage and he didn’t know if it would survive the night. About two hours later, he said that the cat had died.

That got me thinking about the personal experiences that are shared on blogs and micro-blogs like Twitter. People write about the birth of a child, the loss of a loved one, getting engaged & married, fights with cancer, and many other similar things. I’ve posted about the struggles my Mom has had this year with her multiple intestinal surgeries and hospital stays. What compels people to write about such personal events for friends, family, and complete strangers to read?

I think that it helps us not feel alone in the situations whether they are good times or not so good. That there are others out there who have has these experiences that make us human. It’s also cathartic for me to help express whatever feelings I’m having at the time.

Although I was saddened by the death of a cat I never met in a garage I’ve seen maybe once, there was a connection there last night and this morning as well. Some of us even reminisced about the kitten we found in the crawlspace under our apartment in college. It’s interesting to see how we adapt new technologies to join and unite with others we’ve known a long time or just met this week.